Announced last week, Brokeback Mountain will be adapted into an Opera for the New York City Opera in 2013. Announced today, An Inconvenient Truth faces the same fate. Al Gore’s popular book and documentary film on Earth’s environmental crisis will be performed at La Scala (one of the world’s most famous opera houses) in Milan in 2011.

Can popular and current film adaptations increase waning audiences? Or is this just opera light?

Sidenote: I have never been to an opera, but I would definitely consider seeing Brokeback in aria form. Then again, who knows where we’ll be in 2013?

The new design competition from Doc Martens is basically the same idea as Pepsi’s, but at least they’re making an effort to give it that populist, democratic air by opening up submissions and voting to schmoes like you and me (oh, and of course there will also be “a panel of industry insiders” to choose a second winning design). At any rate, it’s a far better marketing move than what Converse pulled out of their ass recently. Hopefully this will be a good marketing move for Doc Marten’s (seriously, does anyone even wear these anymore?), but they’ve still got a long way to go before they fully recover from this debacle.

UPDATE: This post really isn’t complete without this clip from the Young Ones, where Alexei Sayle sings a workers’ rallying cry dedicated to “Doctor Marten’s Boots.”

Drama in the local art scene! Tonight is the closing party for the Arlington Arts Center‘s Collector’s Select show, in which the AAC invited six local art collectors to each curate a gallery as they see fit. Local collector Philippa Hughes invited some local graffiti artists to create murals in the gallery she was assigned, but this didn’t sit too well with Kriston Capps in this piece for the Washington City Paper. Capps questions the difference between curators and collectors (“…curating requires a skill set, whereas collecting is mostly a product of circumstance and inclination”), the edginess of exhibiting so-called street art in a hermetically sealed gallery space (“a door that’s been open for nearly three decades”), and even the formal qualities of the burners on display (“as tags, they’re not particularly intricate or witty; as abstraction, they don’t offer much”). Then Capps’ fellow WCP writer Jeffry Cudlin (who also just so happens to be the Director of Exhibitions at the AAC) tore apart those points one by one on his own blog, although not without a little pre-emptive asskissing (“as far as intelligent local art writing in print media, he’s the only game in town”). Capps, of course, posted the obligatory rebuttal/defense here, but both sides raise interesting questions. What do you think about graffiti in galleries? About the cult of youth and street culture? About the DC art scene in general?

What do you think of Meghan McCain? She’s the 23-year-old blonde daughter of a 71-year-old man running for president on the Republican ticket, but she did for John Kerry in the ’04 election and she puts indie pop on her blog’s playlists! More from GQ.